"Desire is irrelevant, I'm a Machine!"

13/09/2006 Written by Roberto Preatoni (SyS64738)

We actu­ally don’t know if the man who is known world­wide as the unbeat­able Ter­mi­na­tor, has changed his mind in the mean­time, but we guess that he is now desir­ing above all things to go behind in Time, and put a lit­tle more atten­tion in the tricks of technology…

As the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle reported yes­ter­day , a crim­i­nal enquiry has been recently opened about var­i­ous breaches and unau­tho­rized down­loads by out­side hack­ers into the com­puter of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Office.The Governor’s offi­cers urged author­i­ties to open a for­mal inves­ti­ga­tion after an ille­gally recorded pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion was dis­closed last week to the Los Ange­les Times.

In the six-​minutes con­ver­sa­tion –that hap­pened dur­ing a meet­ing with some mem­bers of Schwarzenegger’s inner cir­cle last spring– he “describes Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors as the “wild bunch” and, refer­ring to a Latina law­maker, casu­ally says that “black blood” mixed with “Latino blood” equals “hot” — a fiery per­son­al­ity.”

These state­ment pro­voked an imme­di­ate action by the Demo­c­rat oppo­nents, that harshly crit­i­cized the Gov­er­nor call­ing his remarks an affront to minori­ties.  

At present, an inves­ti­ga­tion by the Cal­i­for­nia High­way Patrol on how the tape was acquired by the L.A. Times is in process, point­ing out the fact that “the state’s com­puter sys­tem was breached from indi­vid­u­als using out­side com­put­ers” on three sep­a­rate occa­sions — Aug. 29, Aug. 30 and Sept. 4,an offi­cial said, describ­ing the breach as “a very seri­ous mat­ter.” 

The experts mon­i­tor­ing gov­ern­ment com­puter sys­tems  are in agree­ment with the fact that National secu­rity Sys­tem is  among the most vul­ner­a­ble to out­side hack­ers, and  espe­cially those sys­tems used by Cal­i­for­nia state agen­cies are well known as antiquated.

Accord­ing to a recent sur­vey, indeed, a sur­pris­ing num­ber of gov­ern­ment com­puter sys­tems are more than 10 years old and they can count on very lit­tle pro­tec­tion. “Gov­ern­ment sys­tems are pen­e­trated on a reg­u­lar basis,” said Bev Har­ris, exec­u­tive direc­tor of Black Box Vot­ing, a Seattle-​based group con­cerned about elec­tronic vot­ing and hacking.

“There’s a lot of gov­ern­ment offices that you wouldn’t think would be vul­ner­a­ble, but they have been pen­e­trated,” she said, cit­ing the Pen­ta­gon as hav­ing its com­put­ers recently breached by a hacker.

About the issue of the taped con­ver­sa­tion that pro­voked so many trou­bles to the Gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia, it is still unclear if the inves­ti­ga­tion would also involve any Times staffers, but con­sid­er­ing the newspaper’s will­ing­ness to coop­er­ate with the inves­ti­ga­tors, there’s rea­son to believe that any of them is involved in the leak.

The Repub­li­can party used such occa­sion to spec­u­late that the leak was actu­ally a plot orches­trated by Democ­rats oper­a­tives, but Demo­c­ra­tic party offi­cials rejected any involve­ment either in the leak of the tapes or in any hack­ers’ attack.

What is clear, is just the poor fig­ure which  the per­son who had embod­ied for years the pro­tec­tor of the weak­est and the guardian of jus­tice, and who used this fic­tional image to set up his own polit­i­cal cam­paign, has stum­bled in .

And it is slightly iron­i­cal that a char­ac­ter who used to claim “I’m a machine” has been so trag­i­cally betrayed…by machines!  


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